Surviving Trump: The KKK and Donald Trump

In mid-September, the EPSN host Jemele Hill tweeted an entirely reasonable series of statements including “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists,” and “Trump is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. His rise is a direct result of white supremacy. Period.” In response to the ensuing backlash, The New York Times ran an op-ed titled “Is Trump a White Supremacist?”

In the piece, Charles M.Blow writes, “If you are not completely opposed to white supremacy, you are quietly supporting it,” concluding: “Either Trump is himself a white supremacist or he is a fan and defender of white supremacists, and I quite honestly am unable to separate the two designations.”

While Blow offers a thoughtful assessment of Trump’s white supremacism, the fact that the piece’s central question—a query vaguely akin to “Should I Accept Anthony Weiner’s Friend Request on Snapchat?”—needed to be asked in the first place indicates that we’ve officially descended into some surreal, fake-news hellscape where every red-blooded American can choose between facts and alternate facts, attend a lecture by Harvard Fellow Sean Spicer, and wait for the next Official Donald J. Trump Big League Box of the Month to arrive via a privatized U.S. Postal Service.

And if you support a president who does those things, that makes you a white supremacist, too. Of course, supporting/being white supremacists isn’t something large segments of the American public has ever really had a problem with.

In her latest book,The Second Coming of the KKK, historian Linda Gordon charts the rise of the reconstituted Klan—which at the height of its power in the 1920s boasted some 6 million members, including 16 senators, scores of congressmen, and 11 governors. The book not only offers a look back at how the hate group achieved unparalleled mainstream success, but also shines a light on our current political momentand the man who won the White House in 2016.

The Millions chatted with Gordon recently by phone about bigoted feminism, the evil fusion of racism and religion, how the media misrepresents the women’s movement, and the future of hate groups in Trump’s America.

The Millions: As I read the book, I was struck by the similarities between the tactics of the Klan of the 1920s and those of the alt-right and Donald Trump. Things like saying immigrants are taking jobs, blaming minorities for crime, fear about the collapse of law and order. In what ways do you see these two movements as similar or different?

Linda Gordon: As a preface, I would say I decided very deliberately not to mention Trump, Trumpism, the alt-right, or anything contemporary in the book. Partly because I figured people would see these things themselves. And I wanted to retain my commitment to evidence. But the similarities are extraordinary. One is bigotry; another is the use of conspiracy theory. And conspiracy theory is very closely related to fake news because one of the advantages of conspiracy theories is that you can explain away the fact that there is no evidence for your claim as a kind of circularity. That because conspiracies are secret, of course there is no evidence.

There is also something that is characteristic of only a very small part of the alt-right today. One of the Klan’s most brilliant moves was to fuse religion with bigotry. That was absolutely not characteristic of the first Klan with its terrorism and lynching. The choice to do that was extremely strategic and instrumental. In other words, to bring in a kind of evangelical notion that is related to the claim that America had a destiny—a destiny anointed by God to be a white Nordic Protestant nation.

TM: You identify six “ancestors” that contributed to the ‘20s Klan’s makeup: racism, nativism, temperance, fraternalism, Christian evangelicalism, and populism. Of those six, it seems maybe temperance and fraternalism are less relevant today. How have the six pillars aged since the 1920s?

LG: The temperance issue is more or less dead. I don’t think that you’re going to get traction from a prohibitionist point of view today. Although it may be related to people who have prohibitionist attitudes about drugs. The issue of fraternalism is a little bit more complicated because by fraternalism we can mean certain kinds of fraternal organizations. And over time, those organizations—the Elks, the Masons—they still exist, but they’ve lost ground to organizations that are more like Rotary Clubs, that are organizations designed to benefit people through networking.

But, by fraternalism you can also mean the construction of the kinds of bonds that were once called brotherhood, which I think are really important to all social movements, whether on the left or the right. And one of the satisfactions of participating in a social movement is that very close feeling of brotherhood with other people.

One of the things that’s a little different about that today, though, is that in many situations, like what happened in Charleston, the fraternalism of the white nationalists works by their sense that they are the persecuted minority.

TM: That seems like something that the Klan of the ‘20s did to great success?

LG: Exactly. And, they did it despite the fact—I think it is arguably the case—that the majority of white Protestant Americans would have agreed with the Klan’s basic principles, and it may be that they differed only in terms of the intensity of the way they wanted to promote those ideas.

Whereas today I do think—and this is a little bit reassuring—that the alt-right remains a minority; that we do have a pretty solid majority of Americans who want to reject that kind of revving up of racist anger.

TM: You devoted a chapter to the women of the Klan—many of whom could be described as feminists, and without whom the Klan of the ‘20s would’ve been much less powerful and less successful. But you describe it as a “bigoted feminism.” And you write, people “must rid themselves of the notions that women’s politics are always kinder, gentler, and less racist than men’s.” That made me think of the large percentage of white women who voted for Trump, which surprised a lot of people. Not to equate female Trump voters with Klanswomen, but what parallels do you see between those two groups.

LG: If I have any anxiety about people being offended by the book, it will have to do with that chapter because there are many people, including people I know and love, who want to think that you have to define feminism as a progressive, antiracist issue—and that any other claims are just not really feminism.

Whereas my preference is to say, well, unfortunately, it’s not up to us to define feminism and that we have to use it in a generic sense in which anyone who is after greater rights for women or greater sex equality can be called a feminist. But I think that Klan feminism does illustrate something very important about the support that so many women gave to Trump, and that is that we cannot assume that women’s concerns with gender issues are always their prominent concerns—their most prominent concerns.

In the ‘20s, once the women’s suffrage amendment passed, the Klan supported it energetically. They thought they’d get more votes that way. But today, I think there is a lot of resentment against the fairly powerful women’s movement that arose in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. I think that resentment has two different sources.

One, I would argue, as someone who’s taught and studied social movements, that almost no social movement has been as misrepresented by the media as the women’s movement. Misrepresented in the direction of focusing almost exclusively on sex and reproduction issues. Sexual freedom, abortion, support for gay and transgender rights. The coverage usually neglected issues that just may not seem as newsworthy, like the enormous energy put into campaigns for subsidized childcare, for paid parental leave, for equal access to jobs and promotions. What you might call the more base economic issues. And those include campaigning for things that benefit women who are not employed as well as for women who are employed.

I also think that, like it or not, we have to face the fact that some of the more prominent people, groups, and energy behind contemporary feminism comes from a more professional class. Highly educated women who often, just as men of that class do, speak rather disdainfully of people who don’t agree with them. And that leads to another point that I think is problematic today—and that is the way that people who are on the liberal side speak of people who are more sympathetic to the Trump side. And that is to speak of them very disdainfully—Oh, how can they be so dumb? How can they be so ignorant as to believe these things and to be taken in by these lies?

That’s not only not productive, but it’s also not correct. One of the things we know from the polls is that very large numbers of very prosperous and very well-educated people supported Trump. I don’t think that lack of smarts can explain that phenomenon.

TM: To turn back to the ‘20s Klan, that second incarnation was much more successful than the first and third, at least in terms of membership. And probably more successful than any other hate group in U.S. history. What do you attribute that success to?

LG: At base, the success came from broadening the repertoire of who were the targets, of who were the bad guys. So a lot of people could be pulled in. Part of the reason they went that way is that something built strictly on anti-black racism would not have had traction in the ‘20s in the North because there were so few African-Americans living in the North.

In a lot of places of the core Klan strength— say, Indiana—people probably had never seen a Mexican-American and had never seen an Asian-American. So, the Klan was very effective in adapting to local issues. In the State of Washington, they were very focused on anti-Japanese bigotry.

You have to keep in mind another aspect of the Klan—that it became very big, but it also declined very fast. And people who have been able to look closely at some of the actual records of memberships and collection of dues have found that there was tremendous turnover. People got drawn in and lost interest. Now, partly it was because belonging to that Klan was pretty expensive, and partly it was because people just got tired of one part of what attracted them, which is all this kind of arcane hocus-pocus ritual that at first seemed like entertainment.

But you also have to consider the background of the so-called opposition. Between the ‘20s and today, we do have a much stronger consensus around civil liberties, around antidiscrimination—at least hostilely to legal discrimination. The whole country has moved closer toward an acceptance of what you might call a liberal democratic perspective, as opposed to the Klan’s democracy for the “right people.”

One major difference is that today’s Klan is completely decentralized. There is no Imperial Wizard who can command the allegiance of people and can head what was really a giant moneymaking machine. That’s not the case today. Possibly people today are a little more of the view that social movements should be separate from profitmaking enterprises.

TM: The success the Klan had in the ‘20s, do you think that could ever be replicated by a similar hate group today?

LG: I would never say never. I would never rule out anything. We have seen the way in which American foreign policy ventures can rev up a tremendous spirit of patriotism, and the notion that if you don’t support them you’re not a good American. It was three decades after the Klan that we saw the enormous impact of McCarthyism and its ability not just to persecute a relatively small number of people—but that persecution functioned in a manner that was designed to be intimidating to masses of people. It certainly made lots of people more reluctant to speak out and willing to assume that anything that was being labeled as un-American or unpatriotic was something they should not even bother to find out about.

TM: Based on your study of the success of the Klan from the ‘20s, what lessons should people committed to fighting hate and racism take away from that period of history?

LG: One really important takeaway is that bigotry is all of a piece. You can’t be antiracist if you’re not also anti-anti-Semitic. There are a number of reasons for that. One is it all comes from the same place in the psyche, that is an inclination to direct your anger downward rather than upward.

Another feeling that I have—though it doesn’t precisely come from my work on the Klan; it comes perhaps from a little bit of anxiety I have at some of the responses to the alt-right—is that trying to fight them on their own terms is a mistake. I probably lean toward almost 100 percent passivism. I really dislike violence unless it’s absolutely a last defensive resort. I’m a little disturbed by the rise of these antifa groups. We have to remain clear about our commitment to freedom of speech, but at the same time about the enormous importance of standing up against these ideas in every possible nonviolent way.

One of the problems in social movements on the liberal side in the last 30 to 40 years is that a lot of what used to be social movements have really become professional organizations. So, for example, NARAL, which I certainly support. What they want of me is simple: they want a contribution. That’s all they want from me. One of the geniuses of the Klan and of many social movements is that they ask people to do something, not just to contribute money… Some of the most successful [social movements] are those that literally demanded a certain level of active participation and basically communicated that you’re not a member of this unless you actually participate. Invoking a little discipline on members. That was very, very characteristic of the Civil Rights Movement and very much behind some of its victories.

We can’t defeat these kinds of things simply by giving money to professional lobbying groups. They’re extremely important. I don’t want to denigrate them in any way. But people have to be prepared to do more. And one of the hopeful signs is that people have gone to anti-Trump demonstrations that have never demonstrated before.

TM: What does America need to do to survive Donald Trump?

LG: One of the worst problems that we face is not Trump himself, but the relative unwillingness of any Republicans to really break with him, because their allegiance is, above all, to the votes they think that kind of thing can produce.

I love all the comedians that make fun of Donald Trump. He’s a very easy target. One of the problems in that—and the focus on the Russia connection—is it takes people’s attention [away from] what is going on underneath. The deregulation of everything, the giving away of the National Parks, the deregulation of Wall Street, the stripping of the environmental safety regulations.

So, one thing we could do, is to try to keep the focus on policy—on what is actually being changed in the Constitution and the network of laws that we have in this country that do what government is supposed to do, which is to protect us.

Adam Boretz
is a writer, a contributing editor at The Millions, and an editor at Publishers Weekly. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. His fiction has appeared most recently in The Literary Review, Fawlt, and Encyclopedia.

As the Trump administration hobbles and flails in the vague direction of Day 100 – 96 down, just 1,364 to go as of this writing – it’s easy to get wrapped up in the day-to-day incompetence and surreal ineptitude of The Donald and his Legion of Doom: e.g. Sean Spicer on Hitler; e.g. Jeff Sessions on Hawaii, e.g. the taxpayer tab for all those weekend jaunts to Mar-a-Lago; e.g. Trump’s historically low approval ratings; e.g. Trump’s oratory prowess and display of patriotism during the recent Easter Egg Roll.
But focusing on things like our Commander-in-Chief reviewing policy briefs in the Oval Office with Kid Rock and Ted “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” Nugent, would be to lose sight of what Donald Trump’s presidency has really been: a full-scale assault on America’s most threatened populations. From his bumbling attempt to strip 24 millions Americans of their health insurance to rescinding protections for transgender students to proposing a budget that cuts vital services for lower-income Americans to refusing to monitor troubled police agencies, President Trump has demonstrated a disregard – if not outright animosity – for our most vulnerable communities.
However, that disregard and animosity is certainly nothing new or unique to the Trump Administration. In his latest book, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond, Marc Lamont Hill describes a growing group of citizens “made vulnerable, exploitable, and disposable” in contemporary America. In telling the stories of those regarded by the powerful and privileged as “Nobody” – people like the citizens of Flint, Mich., black men and women like Michael Brown and Freddie Gray and Trayvon Martin, like Sandra Bland and Walter Scott – Hill places our current moment in historical context while offering an examination of race, class, and capitalism in 21st-century America.
Hill -- a distinguished professor of African American studies at Morehouse College, host of BET News and VH1 Live, and a political contributor for CNN -- spoke with The Millions by phone about police brutality, American Empire in decline, the importance of black bookstores, and the power of everyday people to change the world.
The Millions:Nobody was published while Barack Obama was president. The paperback comes out with a very different man in the Oval Office. Obviously, Donald Trump isn’t good for the vulnerable people you're writing about in Nobody—but how exactly does he alter your thinking? Does he change the way we need to approach fighting the oppression of people “marked as poor, black, brown, immigrant, queer, or trans"?
Marc Lamont Hill: I'm not sure that he does. I think that's what's interesting. What I get at in the book is that we can't reduce the condition of our nation or the plight of the vulnerable to a set of dispositions, a set of attitudes, or a small group of people with a particular point of view. There's a deeper structural problem here. There's a deeper institutional challenge that we face…I don't ever think that a particular kind of tide turn or election outcome will alter the fundamental structural challenges that we face. If anything, it just reminds me that we have serious work to do, no matter who's in office.
I do think, though, that Donald Trump represents a different moment. Part of the problem is that we've cried wolf so many times when a Republican runs for office. We say ‘Oh, this is the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of America, and if we elect so-and-so the sky's going to fall.’
TM: Meanwhile, Mitt Romney sounds wonderful right about now.
MLH: Exactly. And then you get a Donald Trump. And it's like, oh wait, maybe the sky actually is falling this time. Even Republicans are saying, ‘Hey, this is not what we're used to, what we imagined.’
The Donald Trump moment represents something different in that it may feel more urgent, and some of the battles that we fought in the 1930s, ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s are now forced to be re-fought and some of the legal victories that we achieved are now going to have to be relitigated. The Donald Trump moment may represent a greater urgency and a kind of re-tracking of previous moments…Despite the darkness of the moment, we can still change. The thing that gives me hope is the fact that since August 9, 2014, we have seen a sustained and protracted movement of activists, of students, of clergy, who are changing the game. We're watching social media become different in terms of its usage. We’re watching digital technology. We're watching all of this stuff become something else. It's an extraordinary moment with extraordinary possibilities. They say only in the darkness can you see the stars. The Trump moment is darker, but to me that just spotlights what's possible even more.
TM: There are a lot of people who think the deaths of Michael Brown or Eric Garner are part of a recent trend, a spike in police violence. But the truth is that the killing of black men and women by police is nothing new. What's different—and you point this out in the book—is that now people have cellphones and they can take video and upload it to the Internet. I'm interested in your take on technology's changing role as a tool in the struggle against oppression.
MLH: The fact that the technology exists in some ways underscores a deeper problem, which is around the ability of black people to narrate their own experience with credibility. Black witness doesn't matter. The fact that black folks have been saying ‘Hey, we're getting killed,’ forever doesn't matter. We talk about police brutality, police terrorism. Every experience you've seen on these videos are experiences that are articulated by black people. And people say, ‘Oh, you're exaggerating.’ I mean Rodney King. People in South Central L.A. weren't shocked by that. They were just shocked that the police didn't see the camera.
While some people are really excited about this moment, and there is reason to be, it's also a reminder that black witness in and of it itself means nothing. That it's only with the augmentation of the cellphone, smartphone technology, digital video streaming, that people believe us. And essentially, they're not believing us; they're believing their own eyes.
The problem is that when you live in a nation-state that is undergirded by white supremacy, by anti-black racism, and by really irrational narratives about black people, the video still proves insufficient. How many times did we watch Walter Scott run away?
He gets shot in the back and it didn't matter. We watched Sandra Bland get harassed, it didn't matter. We saw Eric Garner with his hands up, it didn't matter. So, this technology is helpful in a certain way. It certainly helped, it was a mobilizing tool and an organizing tool, and it certainly gives us a better chance at quote-unquote justice than we would have without it. But I never want to overstate or fetishize technology because that suggests that the system is functional in the interest of justice, and all we needed was just a little more proof and we'd be in there, and that's just not the case.
TM: In a previous interview in this series, Pankaj Mishra talked about the unfulfilled promise of neoliberal capitalism and democracy and how it fuels both terrorism and populist rage. In Nobody you talk about the role of neoliberal capitalism—that valuing of unrestrained profit for the few over the public good, which obviously leads to more citizens that are vulnerable and disposable. What are the historical processes that led us to this point where we’re devaluing everything except increased profits at all costs?
MLH: We've always valued democratic citizenship, and democracy is almost an obsession of America. What's contested is what democracy looks like, how it's constituted, and how we arrived there. And over the last few decades—not just here, but in Britain and other places around the world—the liberalization of the market, that is to say the unfettering of market forces, has led us to not just worship the market and to believe in the capacity of the market to yield all positive outcomes, but it's also led us to equate unfettered capitalism with full-fledged democracy. And therefore, citizenship becomes consumership. And so, over the decades…you find an increased sense that to be a citizen is to be a consumer. The more access you have to goods and consumption, the more rich and full your citizenship is, the more fully realized your democratic project is.
The problem is as people don't have access to capital, as they don't have access to individual success and prosperity—which becomes the measure of progress; it’s no longer a collective vision, it’s no longer a valuing of the welfare state or a collective investment in the good of everyone, but rather individual success and merit—what you begin to see is the collapse of people's faith in the system when they're not accessing those notions of prosperity. If I look up 20 years later and I can't work at the assembly line in Flint anymore and I can't get a living-wage job anymore, I'm now thinking something's wrong. I'm now thinking something's wrong with the country. I'm thinking the country’s moving in the wrong direction. And it's very easy under those regimes and under those moments to not blame the system itself because it's easier to imagine the end of the world itself than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
You then blame all the people who weren't there before, all the forces that weren't there before, all the leadership structures that weren't there before. You blame the black president, you blame the Mexicans, you blame the Arabs for taking the jobs. You don't question the actual mechanisms of capital. You don't question the oligarchies. You don't question the one percent because you still aspire to be the one percent, even if it's against all empirical evidence to the contrary…
If you normalize the idea that individual prosperity is the measure of who we're supposed to be as citizens and that collective consumership is the marker of an effective democracy, then you end up in a space where 99 percent of us—certainly 90 percent of us—are going to be profoundly frustrated at all times with the condition of our democracy.
But again, you're not looking at the machinery of capital, you're looking at all these other factors, which are really symptoms and not the problem itself, not the illness itself. And that's how you end up with a Trump in office: because you've got a bunch of poor, disenfranchised people who decide to choose a billionaire to lead them out of the economic disaster—when Trump’s economic power and value itself hinges upon the accumulation of mass amounts of wealth at the expense of most people; when his market logic demands a small group of people having a whole bunch of stuff, when efficiencies demand that the job that was once in Flint is now in East Asia, that the job that was in Ferguson, Missouri, is now in the Far East. When that happens, you're signing up for more of the same problem, but it makes you feel better. It's like when your eye itches and you keep scratching it. It's like this isn't working, but nothing else is, so let me just keep scratching it, because this is supposed to be working. And that's what's happening right now.
TM: In the book, you say the perfect complement to the current neoliberal economic moment is a turning away from community—people are more isolated, they're more fragmented; you don't have to leave your house, everything is online and everything is delivered. How does that shift exacerbate the war on the vulnerable and how can community help the fightback?
MLH: We are always at our best when we're organized. We're always at our best when we're connected and we're working together and building together. The problem is the forces of neoliberalism…at the discursive and cultural level, they value the individual so much more—we live in the age of the selfie. Everyone's the star of his own show. Everybody's the big attraction of their timeline. Everyone's going live. Everyone's doing all the stuff that pulls people away, because we're only thinking about the self. But then the material conditions of community are also dismantled. So, the community bookstore can't exist anymore.
The public experience we previously imagined—and however flawed and romanticized it was, overly nostalgic it was—there once was a café, there once was a salon, there once was a Masonic Lodge, there once was even a street corner—where we would stand on 125th Street or 52nd Street in Philly or wherever—and we would talk and we would engage and we would build with one another.
I spent my childhood in black book stores engaging ideas. The problem is there's no black bookstore anymore, because Amazon comes, and Amazon comes because it's cheaper, it's more efficient. Big-box retailers break down the mom-and-pop stores. They break down the local places. Even the local corner store that would exist, you know? And we'd hang out in front and talk shit, right? But there's no corner store anymore because there's a Target up the street where I can get a flat-screen TV and a pack of steaks and my prescription filled all at the same place. The way community is engaged is now much more routinized, it's much more mechanical, it's much more technocratic where these big-box retailers all are online. And so much of the physical interaction and connection that we had has now been replaced into the digital sphere.
I'm not saying the digital sphere can't yield its own kind of rewards. But we're still figuring that out. We're figuring out what it means to form community in a hashtag group. We're figuring out what it means to organize digitally. We're figuring out what it means to have even a reading group on Facebook. A book club on Facebook. All of it is different now because of technology, but the market exigencies may push that to happen. So, we're dealing on multiple levels with the way that neoliberalism kind of shifts and shapes our realities.
TM: Given that so much of Nobody is about police violence against black people, you probably spend a lot of time talking about race and probably a lot of that time -- like this interview -- is spent talking to white people. Do you find that fatiguing, or are you hopeful about the willingness or ability of white people to examine their privilege and work towards dismantling white supremacy?
MLH: Hopeful might be overstating it. I'm not pessimistic, though. I believe ultimately in the power of everyday people to change the world. I don't mean that as just some kind of liberal cliché. I legitimately believe in the people and I legitimately believe that with the right organizing, the right political education, we can do anything. Getting white people to abandon whiteness is—that might be quixotic, you know? I mean, it's incredibly difficult to get anyone in power to yield their power and privilege and control. I mean, getting men to dismantle patriarchy. Getting straight people to dismantle homophobia. It takes more than a notion.
I think that's the challenge—that it's counterintuitive for people to do that. So, what do we do to get them there? We need some level of interest conversion. We need to convince people that ultimately, the center can't hold; that ultimately, capitalism will dismantle or will break down; that ultimately, the environment will suffer. Ultimately the jobs will leave. That ultimately, none of us can succeed like this. That white supremacy can't hold itself. That ultimately, these white people who are looking for—who are using white skin privilege as a kind of property and as a kind of capital ultimately are going to be disenfranchised, like the white worker who votes for Trump. We have to convince them through political organization, through political education, through activism, through teaching, and through a kind of revolutionary patience that it is possible to change all of this and to make a world that's better for everybody, but that they have to think long term and not short term.
I believe that it's all possible. It's just a hell of a job. So, I'm not optimistic. I don't believe that it's just going to happen, but I am full with hope. That's probably the best way to put it. I'm not optimistic about it, but I am full of hope. That's all we have.
TM: If we look the state of America—with Trump's racist travel bans, the ICE raids, Jeff Sessions, the budget Trump put out, the gutting of the EPA, the spike in hate crimes, the rise of the Alt Right, it's hard to see a happy ending. Where do you think we're headed? Is there a tipping point that we're traveling toward—
MLH: Well, you could argue that America is an empire in decline.
TM: For sure.
MLH: Where that ends, is up to us. I believe we can dictate where we go. We're headed in a very dangerous direction, but the ship can be rerouted. It always can be rerouted. Where we're going right now is a dark morgue, but I think, again, we need a sense of history. If we think that we were moving in the right direction and then November 8, 2016 happens, then we're fundamentally wrongheaded about that. That makes us think that if we could have just elected a Hillary Clinton, if we could have just put in a Bernie Sanders, the world would be totally different. And that's simply not true.
We need a bigger view of the world, a bigger analysis, a thicker analysis. If we do that, we can turn these things around. But to your question, yes, right now, at this moment, given where we're headed economically, socially, culturally, politically, morally, we are moving in the wrong direction and it's not going to end anywhere good for any of us. This is indisputably an empire in decline, but it doesn't mean that end has to be as dire as it would be if we don't do the work.
TM: What do Americans need to do to survive Donald Trump?
MLH: We need to resist. We need to resist. At all times, in all ways, Americans must resist. We must resist the idea that we respect the office. We don't have to. We have to respect his humanity. But we have to say this office, as it stands, is not worthy of respect and it's an imperial throne, and we have to resist it. We have to resist through the electoral process. We can't wait until the next presidential cycle to resist. We have to resist at the local level and the national level. We have to build coalitions that resist. Politicians don't have feelings; they have interests. And we have to make it so their interests converge with ours, so that it's safe for members of Congress to vote down a bill, that we make it safe for them to filibuster, that we make it safe for them to make Donald Trump's life a living hell. Not at a personal level, but at the political level. And not winning will automatically be a personal hell for him.
We have to resist on the streets. As our Syrian or Somali or Sudanese brothers and sisters get turned away, we have to fight to bring them back in. As we've seen the assault on civil liberties, we have to push back. We have to fight at every turn. We have to resist through our classroom teaching. We have to resist through the books we write. We have to resist through everything from what we name our children to who we hang out with to the kind of art we make. We have to resist at all times.
My Palestinian brothers and sisters have a word called sumud—and sumud is steadfastness. We have to be steadfast. You know, steadfast means that resistance doesn't happen just at a march or a rally. It's not just a momentary blip on the screen. It's a lifelong commitment to resisting. If we can remain steadfast, then I think we win.
Can't get enough Surviving Trump? Check out previous installments in the series, featuring Lewis Lapham, Masha Gessen, and Pankaj Mishra.

In case you've already moved into a doomsday bunker in backwoods Maine and can only check the news when you're not stockpiling water purification tablets, cleaning your handgun, or mucking out the composting toilet, the first month of Donald Trump's presidency proved to be a frightening, cruel, incompetent, and heartbreaking trainwreck.
Each passing day -- replete with its frenzy of twisted executive orders; abusive phone calls with long-time allies; obsessive lying about inauguration crowd size; reality-show parade of inept and fascistic underlings; and deranged late-night tweets -- brought fresh horrors that made it all but impossible to recall the fresh horrors of yesterday. Remember when Trump ordered the EPA to remove the climate change pages from its website? Remember that time Trump threatened to impose martial law in Chicago? Remember when Trump coordinated his response to North Korea’s missile test in front of a crowd of diners at Mar-a-Lago? Remember that time Trump failed to condemn the national spike in hate crimes, but got really upset at Nordstrom for dropping Ivanka's accessories and clothing line?While keeping up with a fast-moving autocrat bent on dismantling the free press and gutting democratic institutions is something new for most Americans, it's business as usual for Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen-- a long-time critic of Vladimir Putin and author of The Man Without a Face, The Brothers, and Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot.
As our Commander-in-Chief was about midway through his now infamous Fine-Tuned-Machine Press Conference, Gessen spoke with The Millions by phone about conspiracy theories, trauma psychology, nuclear holocaust, and life during the Trump Years.
The Millions: Can you please tell me what the hell is going on between Donald Trump and Russia. I mean there's Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, his creepy admiration for Putin, Rex Tillerson is Secretary of State -- and then this week alone Mike Flynn resigned, we learned that Trump campaign aides were talking to Russian intelligence, there's a Russian naval ship 30 miles off the coast of Connecticut. Given your experience of Russian politics and knowledge of Putin, what do you think all of this means?
Masha Gessen: [Laughs.] I'm fundamentally opposed to conspiracy theories and I'm a proponent of the stupidity and incompetency of the world. I think that what's going on is, so far, consistent with the stupidity and incompetency of the world. It’s possible that there's a vast conspiracy to rig the American election and get Mike Flynn into the administration to lift sanctions, et cetera, et cetera. It’s very hard to believe that someone as, frankly, dumb as Mike Flynn and someone as incompetent as Vladimir Putin, and someone as equally as incompetent as—well, actually, someone even more incompetent, like Donald Trump, could have pulled off such a brilliantly divined, long-term operation. And until we see definitive evidence of that, I'm going to hold fast to that view. For another reason as well, which is that there's plenty in plain view to make the situation unacceptable, unimaginable, frightening as hell.
What I think happened is that -- and using the available information -- Russia has a long-standing pattern and policy of disrupting elections in the Western world. They tried to do it during the Soviet period, they weren't very good at it. Then they started doing it in the post-Soviet period. They weren't that great at it either. What's interesting about this is they weren't good at it during the Soviet period because they didn’t have the slightest idea of how the Western world worked. What's disturbing is that their idea as to how the world works hasn't changed very much. It appears that the world has gotten closer to the way Russia thinks it works. There is a confluence of circumstances that is magical, that feels magical for Putin, that someone like Donald Trump has been elected president. I don't think he was elected president because of Putin's interference. He was elected president because Americans voted for him and because Americans have an archaic system for electing presidents and because America is a polarized country and because America has a broken system of political parties. And for all those reasons, and because right-wing populists like Donald Trump are basically irresistible. For all those reasons, America elected Trump.
And I think that Putin was very much on top of the world. At his annual press conference -- and yes, annual press conference -- he actually had a question asked of him, because it’s a scripted affair, so he had a question asked: how does it feel to be the most powerful man in the world. That's very much how he's feeling, or was feeling after the election. He's already had a few unpleasant surprises. Sanctions haven't actually been lifted. And it's been a month…That points to the fact that there was no deal. But there were hopes and understandings on both sides. That is the reason for Russian's current increase in aggression. And what Russia's doing is aggression. It's not invasion, it's not acts of war. But it's sort of reminding Trump of what Putin thought was a wide understanding that they were now going to sit down and divvy up the world. And Putin has been very clear about the fact that that's what he wants America to do. He wants a Yalta number two, and that's what he was expecting from Trump. And one last point on that: why is the United States not responding? Because it's incompetent. Because it has an incompetent administration
TM: What do you think Putin thinks of Donald Trump? Sanctions that might be lifted or might not be lifted aside, does having Trump instead of Hillary Clinton in the White House impact Putin's culture war against the West?
MG: Yes. Absolutely. Hillary Clinton in the White House was unimaginable. [Putin] personally hates her. He blames her for the protests in Russia in 2011 and 2012. Also, she's a woman. It's bad enough he has to deal with Merkel…At least that's just Germany. It's not the most powerful country in the world. And he thinks Trump is a buffoon. He's made that very clear. When Trump thought Putin was saying that he was brilliant, he was actually saying that he was colorful, which is not much of a compliment. Putin is not the kind of guy who appreciates pure beauty in the world -- and if he says something is colorful, you can bet that he's not taking it seriously.
TM: Do you think Russia has a Donald Trump golden shower sex tape?
MG: This is the sort of thing that I'm very familiar with in Russia. Not in the sense of golden showers sex tapes—but I've seen lots of other sex tapes that I wish I hadn’t seen—but the believability standard of reporting. And the answer is, we don't know. I can't think anything about it because I don't know. Facts are not a thing that you debate. It exists or it doesn’t. One thing that I will say, though, is that I can't imagine -- with the description of that tape that has been made available -- how that could possibly serve as a tool of blackmail. [Trump] owned up to the grabbing-them-by-the-pussy tape and lost no traction with his electorate during a campaign.
TM: Trump and Putin are such different kinds of men. But when reading The Man Without a Face, I was struck by the number of times I underlined something that Putin had done or said and wrote "Trump!" in the margin. What do you think their unifying characteristics are, and how do you see the relationship playing out over four years?
MG: As it happens, I have list of nine similarities between Putin and Trump. Let me just focus on the ones that I can reel off the top of my head without looking at my notes. You're right, they're very, very different. They're very different in affect, they're very different in background. They're very different in the way that they address the public. One uses raw emotion and the other actually prides himself on never betraying an emotion. And they inherited vastly different political systems and historical legacies. That said, they have a number of traits that are actually typical of autocrats and bullies -- and they're both bullies and they're both autocrats…One huge one is the way that they lie. It’s taken Americans a while to understand how Trump lies. That he doesn’t lie in order to make you believe what he is saying. He lies in order to assert power over reality. And it's basically a bully in the playground kind of stance: ‘I'm going to say that it's not your hat that I'm wearing. What are you going to do about it?’ It's the 'What are you going to do about it?' that's always the message. And it's always about power.
Another is their disdain for government as it had been constituted. And again this isn't unique to Putin and Trump -- Hannah Arendt described this in The Origins of Totalitarianism. It was a basic feature of the fascists who rose to power in Europe in the '20s and '30s, and certainly it was a basic feature of the Leninist revolution. When Trump said that he wanted to drain the swamp, he didn’t mean, I want to clean up American institutions so that they work better. He meant, American institutions are rotten to the core and they need to be destroyed. And you know, viewed through that lens, it suddenly makes sense that almost all of his cabinet appointments are basically people who are fundamentally opposed to the mission of the agency that they are supposed to run. That's not an accident. It's a kind of nihilism that is typical of people like Putin and Trump…[When he said] drain the swamp, he meant just sweep the whole thing into the garbage and start over.
TM: In The Man Without a Face is you illustrate how quickly after coming to power Putin dismantled the independent media and democratic institutions in Russia. And we have Trump coming in, and he's issuing all these executive orders that he may or may not have read, he's talking about voter fraud, he’s making these awful appointments. How much damage do you think Trump can do to American democracy? And how quickly do you think he can do it?
MG: He can do an incredible amount of damage. I think, oddly, that the speed at which he has moved is actually a blessing because as fast as Putin was, his larger project actually took a long time. It took him a year to take over the media. It took him three years to dismantle the electoral mechanisms in a country that didn’t have a very strong media or very strong electoral mechanisms. So, he was methodical. But what I think is remarkable in terms of speed about Putin is that he started on day one and he wasted no time. But he moved methodically. Trump is not methodical, and this is one major difference between them…The fact that Trump hasn’t given us a second of normality is actually a blessing because it makes it easier to maintain a constant state of outrage. I keep waiting for the moment when people sit back and go, ‘Oh, okay. Well, this I can live with.’ It happens a little bit. I mean like Neil Gorsuch. Neal Gorsuch: this I can live with. As awful as he is politically, he's not fundamentally opposed to the mission of the Supreme Court, which is what I was really afraid of. I was really afraid of a Peter Thiel or somebody on the Supreme Court. Except for those tiny, tiny specs of normality, we haven't had a day when it's like, ‘Phew, I can think about dinner.’
The psychological effect of that is devastating because it is a very good instrument of control. There's a term that trauma psychologists use, and trauma psychology has its roots in studying totalitarian groups and totalitarian societies. They have a term: low-level dread…It’s a really important term because they view it as an instrument of control, because a person in a state of low-level dread can sort of function: can go to work, can get their children from daycare. But in that state, people lose their ability to plan for the future, which is an essential element of having human agency…It's not all great that he's moving so fast. Psychologically, it's devastating. But I also think that it may be good for the future of our institutions because it's so plain what's happening. And it does maintain a state of mobilization among those who are resisting.
TM: You told Samantha Bee that your greatest fear about the Trump administration was nuclear holocaust. That actually seems pretty reasonable. How do you see that playing out, and why is that a possibility Americans should take seriously?
MG: You asked me how I see the relationship between Trump and Putin playing out. I don’t see it playing out very well. What we're already seeing is Putin basically saying to Trump, ‘Look, I expected better.’ And these are two men with short tempers, with vengefulness as one of their main motivators, with masculinity issues, with their fingers on the nuclear button, and with no controls over when they push it. That's what makes it a real possibility.
TM:You wrote in The New York Timesrecently about how much of the conversation about Trump has been focused on arguing over what is factual and what is not, at the expense of engaging in discussions that are essential to democracy. What should those discussions look like, and are they happening anywhere?
MG: We need to focus much more closely on the nominations. Some of that has happened. Not enough has happened. We sort of breezed past the fact that most of these nominees bypassed the ethics checks, because so much else is going on. And it's this disorientating cacophony that keeps us from getting focused on one thing. I think we're back down the rabbit hole of investigating the Russia connection. There's nothing wrong with investigating the Russia connection. But the Russia connection, even in the extremely unlikely event that it produces conclusive evidence -- and at most it can produce conclusive evidence of collusion, it can't ever produce conclusive evidence of the results of that collusion -- even in the unlikely event that it produces conclusive evidence of collusion, it's extremely unlikely that it would depose Trump, which I think is everybody's hope. I think the magical thinking here is, ‘Oh, let's investigate Russia. We'll find out that Trump really is a Russian puppet. And then he goes and then this national nightmare is over.’ The chances of that are almost zero.
I would turn attention to what he is doing to agencies, what else is going on with immigration and the ICE raids all over the country...What's actually happening in this country. We were focused for about three seconds on what's happening with the National Parks and environmental agencies, and that feels like ancient history, doesn’t it? But that’s the kind of reversal of the fundamental mission of the agency that we're probably going to see all over the place.
TM: If you had to give the American people one piece of advice on how to survive the next four to eight years, what would that be?
MG: Remember the future. There will be a time after Trump, and we have to keep remembering that -- not just because it gives us hope, but because it's essential to not do anything to undermine that future. There’re some disturbing things that have happened over the last few months, like the calls for the electoral college to vote against Trump, which I thought was just absurdly shortsighted. You can't establish precedent of breaking a system if you're planning to have another presidential election sometime.
I'm really disturbed by psychiatrists who have now, on several occasions, stepped forward and said let's get this guy out of office because that's our professional opinion. I'm old enough to remember when being queer was a psychopathology. And I don't want psychiatrists deciding who is normal enough to be leading this country. Even if this guy is patently insane, that can't be the reason we get him out of office.
And finally, the current situation with Flynn, which is unfolding through leaks from intelligence agencies, which are by definition unsubstantiated. That's the sort of thing that has gotten this country in trouble in the past. It's gotten a lot of other countries in trouble. In the history of the 20th century, a few countries were probably done a favor by their uniformed services who carried out pro-democratic coups -- but we have to be clear that that's the fire that we're playing with. Once you start following the lead of anonymous sources in intelligence agencies who release the information that is useful to them and that serves their cause and expect you to proceed on blind trust, we're in potential military coup territory. That's also not a great way to get rid of Trump.

11 comments:

This interview asks a lot of softball questions.
The Democrats lost to Trump because the of Democrats, not for the easy answers offered in this article. This articles hidden mindset is what will result in continued defeats for the Democrats: a refusal to investigate what it is abut their relationship to globslized capital that resulted in millions of their voters (consistent voters over generations) staying home on election day in 2016.

You will not find a single Democrat or Republican who would favor extending citizenship to all currently present undocumented workers in the US labor force AND requiring e-verify and other robust methods for keeping further undocumented workers from competing for the jobs of these new citizens. At least, I am not aware of one. And the simple reason for this is because upper-class liberals (including people who read this website) and conservatives alike have an intrest in the exploitation of the workers of the developing world. There are exactly three positions that Democrats and non-international-totalitarian Republicans have in common: 1) support for ubiquitous domestic spying conducted by the NSA, 2) aggressive military action used to support the global economy, 3) the exploitation of undocumented labor from the developing world within the boundaries of the rich nation state, which has resulted in a caste system among developed world workers, damaging their solidarity (to the advantage of the people most likely to be reading this article). I submit that had John NcCain run as the Democratic candidate instead of Hillary against Trump he might have won, and the policy positions of the Democratic party would not have meaningfully changed.

Clinton lost to Trump because of white identity politics and the convergence of the extreme factions of the Right (The Tea Party and other ‘Patriot’ militia movements) and the mainstream Republican party, both inflamed by 25 plus years of race-baiting vis a vis Fox News and the plethora of conspiratorial web sites that have multiplied since the election of Barack Obama. Clinton lost because she was a shitty candidate (and the wrong candidate) and because of historical forces beyond her – and everyone else’s – control. And those historical forces have found an avatar in Donald Trump. White Supremacism is a virus that has lain dormant in the American body politic for a long time, and now, because of a weakened immune system, that virus is running rampant. What happens next is what happens when any sickness is unleashed: it will runs its course and despite the damage inflicted, hopefully the body will survive.

TIL…. Sanders supporters that sat out the election because they were disgusted by DNC-HRC cooperation to rig a primary meet Adam’s definition of white nationalists.

Also… Canada’s vocal insistence that they in fact do absolutely have a merit-based immigration policy and absolutely will not have open borders mean they are all white nationalists, every one of them, since this seems to be universally understood as wise among Canadians.

No, I did not vote for Trump btw.

Adam, I have to ask, is there anyone you have allowed into your personal or professional circles that are in the 75% of the country that did not cast a vote for HRC? Is that an automatic filter to exclude such people so you can comfortably sit in a circle with acceptable people that will share your scorn and help you elevate you contempt game, without a moment of pushback?

People have lost their damn minds. Especially Democrats. This isn’t a religion you can excommunicate people from on a whim and insist your followers condemn them all to hell for eternity, however much you fantasize about the being the high-priest of just such a thing.

So HRC lost bc she wasn’t Bernie Sanders, basically? I’m sympathetic with the idea that for the Democratic party to have a meaningful identity it is going to have to actually stand for the ideals it claims to represent, i.e. fairness, equality, etc., and that this ultimately would have to be something akin to a DSA platform. That said, I’m skeptical of the idea that average Americans, quote unquote, know or care about the evils of neoliberalism, or for that matter that they care all that much about immigration. Immigration was not an especially vital political issue before Bannon correctly figured out that it could be used as a means of harnessing inchoate white cultural grievance. This grievance is partly economic in its roots, but largely a product of inevitable social/demographic changes.

Its a shameful spectacle to watch the upper-middle class blame the working class for refusing to vote against its own evonomic interest in the person of Hillary Clinton after watching the (rich) Left ridicule them for years for voting against their economic self-interest by voting for Bush. Not surprisingly, no arguments against my basic evonomic arguments have been made; this is because there are none. Liberal dems are simply the center party of neoliberal globalism.

One cannot properly draw a historical distinction between the Klan and pissed off Trump voters. This is for the obvious reason that we are in two distinct historical epochs. The stakes are actually much, much higher now than they were in 1920s America. Upper-middle class people spewing the white privelege argument disgust me. The life expectancy of POOR whites has plummeted over the last two decades to where the life expectancy of black people as a whole is actually greater now. This is similar to the drop in life expectancy among men after the Soviet Union collapsed. It is a national nightmare that equality of condition amongst whites and African Americans will be achieved in a race to the bottom of an ocean of the lumpenproletariate. Yet this is the future vision put forth by the Democratic party currently: the poor of all races will be equally miserable, the rich of all races will be equally lauded. It is a noble goal to fight for racial equality only if this results in dignity for all races across class boundaries. This will never happen in the current vision of the Democratic party under the Clinton wing, which sees the world in terms of haves and have-note. The white privelege argument as posited by academics is smoke screen to hide the complicity of themselves in the crimes of neoliberalism. It is a knowing, tactical form of white guilt.

What the actual fuck? No decent essay or interview consists of links. Tell it. Don’t fucking link it. May i also say that Sanders should have been the democrat candidate. The Clinton’s are well past their sell by date and fame has distorted their world view. Sanders would have made a great president due to his decency as a human being. This interview is written at a grade 2 level and offends me to my core. The KKK should be illegal, they are a hate group, preaching hate speech. And serious, people talk about Canadians as being polite and decent, well let me tell you, racism, bigotry, hate are alive and well in this large country with its small population.

Oh, again, Canada has hate speech laws, which would make kkk illegal. Yet kkk in america has thrived since the civil war. Men and women have always been a part of the kkk. America’s stupid constitution has allowed this bizarre group to thrive. Hideous.

Let’s forget about Donald Trump.
For just the next 10 minutes.
For just as long as it takes to read this.
I know, I know: it’s not easy, what with his threatening to launch nuclear weapons at North Korea and hiring lunatics and firing lunatics and breaking up with other, more evil lunatics and defending white supremacists, Neo-Nazis, Neo-Confederates, the KKK, and other “very fine people” like this fellow from the march in Charlottesville.
But we really need to forget about him for a moment. Or at least not pay attention to him—and that means not hanging on his every tweet or obsessing about his connection with Russia or his incoherent hate rallies, because if we mute the whole Donald Trump catastrophe, we just might have find time to focus on something a whole lot worse.
In her latest book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, historian Nancy MacLean shines a light on that something a whole lot worse: Charles Koch. But more importantly, she traces the development of the billionaire’s libertarian ideology and political strategy back to one man: the late Nobel Prize-winning economist James McGill Buchanan.
Buchanan and Koch’s brand of libertarianism prizes economic freedom and unfettered capitalism above all else. As such, its adherents are significantly less than chuffed when the federal government makes them pay taxes for things like public schools, health insurance, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and social programs.
But here’s the kicker: Buchanan knew that American Democracy—the fact that a majority of Americans would never choose to eliminate all those social programs and cut taxes for the wealthy and basically bow down before a bunch of rich white guys—was standing in the way of his Libertarian Paradise. So, Buchanan devised a solution: a way to quietly subvert democracy—a very long game, but one that Charles Koch was more than happy to play and fund.
The Millions chatted with MacLean over the phone about the Koch Brothers, Donald Trump’s general incompetency, the nightmarish prospect of President Pence, and where America goes from here.
The Millions: Most people know about the Koch Brothers machine, but are unaware of its origins in terms of political philosophy. Can you give a quick-and-dirty rundown of how school desegregation in Virginia and James Buchanan came to shape not only Charles Koch’s vision but much of American politics today?
Nancy MacLean: I first came across James Buchanan in the context of the State of Virginia’s massive resistance to Brown v. Board of Education in the mid-1950s. Virginia was leading the wider South in fighting the Brown decision, calling it a federal overreach [and] unconstitutional. Buchanan came to Virginia in 1956 just as that was happening to set up a new outpost for free market economics in higher education. He had been trained at the University of Chicago and got this post at Virginia. And he arrived just as the state was fighting the federal government over this decision.
I discovered that, as this fight went on—even though there had been the NAACP's fight, a mobilization of moderate white parents, and two court decisions—in 1959 he tried to keep the fight going with a push to what we today would call privatize public education. He and his colleague issued a report to the State Legislature calling for that.
And that put him on my radar. And, to make a long story short, I started following the trail of his life’s work and found myself with Charles Koch. Beginning in the 1970s, the two started working together on various projects. And then I learned that Charles Koch’s main research and design center/academic base camp, was set up at George Mason University in 1997. And that was James Buchanan’s last institutional home.
Essentially what I learned through this research is that—as we know well from the work of some incredibly talented journalists, among them Jane Mayer—Charles Koch has provided the money for efforts to transform our politics in recent years. And he’s convened a number of wealthy donors to do that. But, it’s actually James Buchanan’s ideas that are making that money successful.
TM: If you had to describe Buchanan and Koch’s vision of ideal America, how does that look?
NM: It’s a libertarian vision...That libertarian vision says that economic liberty is the highest value and that government is an agent of coercion of individuals’ private liberties, and therefore that government’s only legitimate roles are three: to provide for the national defense, to ensure the rule of law, and to maintain social order.
To the libertarian perspective—at least the libertarians involved in organizations like the Cato Institute and a whole slew of others funded by Charles Koch and using James Buchanan’s ideas—to them, all the other functions that government has taken on are illegitimate. That includes economic regulation of corporations. That includes Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. That includes environmental protections. That includes measures to ease the burden of care work on women and families [and] federal anti-discrimination legislation.
Basically, all the things that social movements have pushed for the government to do over the course of the 20th century and into the 21st—all of those things are illegitimate to these libertarians.
TM: A lot of those are relatively popular programs. In that libertarian vision, the will of the majority is viewed as an oppressive force that needs to be stopped, correct?
NM: That’s ultimately the position that they reach. And it was James Buchanan who taught Charles Koch that for capitalism to thrive—the kind of pure capitalism libertarians believe in—democracy must be enchained.
And what I found in my research for this book—and what I think is its single most important contribution to our public understanding—is that this libertarian cause failed repeatedly to achieve what it wanted, it failed openly and it failed repeatedly.
The best example of that is Barry Goldwater in 1964. He was the first candidate to talk about privatizing Social Security, to talk about turning Social Security into individual accounts, adopting a flat tax, selling off the Tennessee Valley Authority to private utilities, undermining labor unions…And he was a disaster. The only places he won, besides his home state of Arizona, were the five states of the Deep South that practiced massive voter suppression. Then Ronald Reagan talked the talk, but didn’t walk the walk. He said, “Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem,” which was encouraging language for libertarians. But as soon as Reagan understood that the libertarian who designed his first budget, David Stockman, planned to inflict massive cuts to Social Security and other popular programs, he drew back.
There was this repeated experience of failing to get what they wanted when it came to the test of majority approval. And it was that repeated failure that led Charles Koch to look for what he called “the technology” to break through. And he is a much smarter man than his critics have allowed. He’s got three engineering degrees from MIT. He’s a voracious reader. He’s someone who has played the long game, both in his business and his politics.
He was investing in intellectuals for three decades before he really shoved in his stack at George Mason. And when he did that, he said he had found the technology—again, that’s his word for the ideas that would enable this breakthrough for liberty.
TM: When you say the technology, what are some examples of that technology?
NM: Buchanan basically taught that the reason government expanded is that organized citizens kept putting pressure on government to expand. And also corporate lobbyists, he would say, but he wasn't as motivated on that front...The idea was that citizens make demands on government for things that involve tax revenues, and that leads to, in his terms, “exploitation” of the wealthier taxpayer.
Towards the end of his life, he actually started using the language of “predators” and “prey.” The predators were all those people who looked to government for collective projects, whether it was unemployment insurance or environmental protection or family and medical leave. And the prey were the taxpayers, the wealthier taxpayers and corporations who will pay the bill. He was always concerned with the rights of that particular minority—not other minorities.
The many fronts on which this cause is seeking to enchain that majority include—as we saw in Wisconsin beginning in 2011 under Scott Walker—measures to try to decimate public sector unions, and vehement attacks on teachers’ unions to try to eliminate their power as lobbyists, as people who might push for larger public budgets. We’ve seen massive voter suppression measures…Gerrymandering to over-represent rural, conservative interests. And that was something going on in the Virginia of the 1950s when Buchanan set to work. Deregulation has been important, other actions along what [Buchanan] depicted as “the spectrum of secession:” advocating to corporations that they use decentralization, federalism, privatization, etc. to essentially engage in coercive bargaining with states to drive down taxes and spending on public programs. They're all interlinked and they're all being promoted by these dozens of national organizations funded by Charles Koch's donor network.
TM: What aspects of our government and society are the most vulnerable right now?
NM: I’m in North Carolina. It was one of the states completely controlled by this radicalized Republican Party. And that’s half of the states, with both houses of the legislature and the governorship controlled by the Republican party. In those states, we have seen really radical changes.
Wisconsin is an example, North Carolina, Kansas, Louisiana: devastating cuts to public education; sending public monies off to charter schools that are under no obligation to teach students anything; private, for-profit charter schools. Rejecting Medicaid expansion as part of the Affordable Care Act. Radical changes to labor union rights and to unemployment insurance, changes to environmental protections. All of these radical things are being rolled out at the state level.
The Trump administration, by some counts, has now 70 percent of its senior appointees from Koch-affiliated organizations. So, that includes his vice-president, Mike Pence. That includes the director of management and budget Mick Mulvaney. That includes Scott Pruitt at the EPA. That includes Mike Pompeo in the CIA. That includes the White House liaison to Congress Marc Short. There are all these Koch-affiliated operatives now in the White House and in various government agencies that are pushing this radical agenda.
TM: How does Trump fit into all of this? He didn’t need any of the Koch Brothers money to run. And some of his positions aren’t—or weren’t—libertarian. But he’s surrounded by all these Koch operatives. Does he have any idea what’s going on?
NM: That is a mystery to me. And I think that is something that future journalists and historians will have to sort out because he’s so surrounded with these Koch people [and] whether he’s aware of it or not, this agenda is moving through in significant ways under his administration.
And he is so clueless about how government works, what’s in the Constitution, that certainly [Koch’s people] can run circles around him. But it’s not clear to me what he knew and when he knew it. Having Mike Pence as his vice-presidential candidate, and then having Mike Pence run his transition team and staff positions, that certainly enabled the Kochs to get a lot of the people in place. And Trump is not really carrying through on a lot of his rhetoric…He made it sound like was going to resist corporate control and resist all these special favors. And yet he’s done more than anybody else to corrupt the process with the kinds of appointments he’s making. So, the jury's still out and we don’t have enough information.TM: A lot of people think if we could just get Trump out of office, everything would be okay again. I doubt you’re one of those people. Which is scarier: President Trump or President Pence?
NM: It’s such an important question. What’s been very frustrating to me—having done this 10 years of research and come to understand how the Koch network and its apparatus of organizations are operating—I cannot believe that so much of the mainstream media seem to have attention deficit—this notion that somehow the Koch story was last year’s story, and this year’s story is Donald Trump all the time. And that is not helpful to us at all.
I understand why some people would like to see him, if he has done anything impeachable, be impeached. But they're not thinking very clearly about what the consequences of that would be...Domestically, I would certainly be much more afraid of a Pence presidency at this point, because Pence is more competent. He’s been in Congress. He’s been in these policy institutes. He has worked in Koch-related organizations over the years. He would be very determined, and he’d probably be pretty successful in pushing through change in a way that Trump has not been as successful.
We’re just in really troubling territory. And the most important thing is to alert Americans to what an incredible turning point we’re at. I’m a historian; I teach the history of social movements in the United States going back to the Revolution. And I truly believe that we are at one of these fundamental national turning points now— that is like the 1860s, that is like the 1930s, or that is like the 1960s. And the choices that we make now will determine the future for the next few generations.
The most crucial thing is to alert Americans to the scale of the transformation this Koch network is trying to push through. But that would, again, require paying less attention to the president’s antics and more attention to these other operations and what they’re achieving.TM: Usually we end these interviews by asking what Americans need to do to survive Trump? That no longer feels like the most pertinent question. So, what do Americans need to do to survive Charles Koch?
NM: What Americans need to understand is that Trump is really, in a sense, not the problem. He is the symptom of a much deeper problem that has been developing for a long time. And it involves this Koch operation, the donors being able to take over one of our major political parties—the Republican Party—and turn it into a delivery vehicle for their agenda by changing the incentives and punishments in politics, which is exactly the kind of thinking that would come from James Buchanan. By creating these big pools of dark money, they are able to punish any Republican candidate who does not toe the line for them. And we already saw them threatening that on the healthcare bill. And, by doing that, they have made Republican elected officials answerable to these extreme-right billionaire donors, rather than to Republican voters.
I would urge people to just avert their eyes from Trump. Just do an experiment even for one week. Ignore all the news about Trump, ignore all his tweets, all his provocations, and start paying attention to these other things. And start paying attention to this strange transformation of the Republican Party, in which it’s not responding to the majority of Republican voters. It is responding to these donors.
There’s a huge need for citizen education and rebuilding the institutions of civil society, the kinds of organizations that we had in the mid-20th century that protected democracy. It’s not just a question of who occupies the White House.

Barring the act of some benevolent god, Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated tomorrow as the 45th president of the United States. That event will serve as a capstone to the grotesque electoral charade our nation has been forced to endure. And while the presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Trump -- long on vitriol, pussy-grabbing, and pandering; short on serious policy ideas and honest debate -- was a disgrace to some, it was an inevitability to Lewis H. Lapham, editor emeritus of Harper’s Magazine and founding editor of Lapham’s Quarterly.
In his latest book, Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy, Lapham argues that the 2016 election was the culmination of a decades-long degradation of American democracy. Beginning with the greed-is-good polices of Ronald Reagan, Lapham describes America's age of folly -- see also George H.W. Bush's Excellent Persian Gulf Adventure; see also the hanging chads of Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Volusia counties; see also Mission Accomplished; see also enhanced interrogation techniques and tax breaks for billionaires and the USA Patriot Act and the never-ending buzz of drone warfare -- illustrating how and why our democracy has given way to a dysfunctional plutocracy of the super-rich, by the super-rich, and for the super-rich.
Taken together, the book’s essays, published between 1990 and 2016 in Lapham’s Quarterly and Harper’s, serve as a powerful and alarming American history. And for Lapham -- echoing Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. -- the failure to connect the past with the present has the potential to "lead to the death of the American enterprise...Children unfamiliar with the world in time make easy marks for the dealers in totalitarian politics, junk science, and quack religion."
With Age of Folly, Lapham provides the historical context needed to understand our current political moment. A few weeks after the election, he sat down with The Millions at his office off Union Square and talked about how we got here, where we’re going, and what we can expect during the Trump Years.
The Millions: You described the 2016 election as an exemplary embodiment of the age of folly. Do you think with the election of Trump, we're still in the age of folly, or did Trump bump us into the next era?
Lewis Lapham: Yeah, we are. Now the question is, can we dig ourselves out? I mean, have we burned it down to the point where we have the ashes out of which, god willing, a phoenix will rise? We got to the ashes part...That’s where we are now. Because I don’t have a lot of confidence in the Trump Administration pulling us out of the mud. I think it will drive us further into the mud. But the question is, how deep in the mud do we have to go before we take it seriously? Before we’re suddenly saying, “Jesus, you know what? Politics does make a difference.”
TM: In Age of Folly, you write “The American equation rests on the habit of holding our fellow citizens in thoughtful regard not because they are exceptional (or famous, or beautiful, or rich) but simply because they are our fellow citizens. If we abandon the sense of mutual respect, we abandon the premise as well as the machinery of the American enterprise.” After this election, it seems that mutual respect has been pretty much abandoned. How can we repair that?
LL: I make that point at the end of [“Hostile Takeover”]. The camera doesn’t hold one’s fellow citizens in regard because they are one’s fellow citizens. The camera holds them in regard because they are famous or rich or beautiful. And I don’t know how you get that back with, essentially, television. Democracy, at least in the American understanding of it, is words. And it’s complicated, it’s always ambiguous, and the people have differences of opinion, and it doesn’t reduce that well to 10-second soundbites. Fascism does, obviously. And so does the lack of historical consciousness.
McLuhan talks about this. Understanding Media comes out in 1964: The medium is the message. The whole habit of thought, it’s about words, and it’s about sequence, and it’s about argument. The electronic media’s a circle. It just keeps going around, repeating ritually. You’ve seen one news show, you’ve seen them all. It really doesn’t change that much. It’s a whole different way of structuring a worldview. Forms of communication change the habits of thought and the styles of feeling. And so our problem is how do we make a political discourse out of emojis?
TM: Trump's victory has been met with much hand-wringing on the left -- and some of it is justified. But in terms of our country as plutocracy, that would have continued under Clinton. It just wouldn’t have been as obvious. Do you think this election is going to serve as a kind of wake-up call?
LL: I do. And I think the American people take very seriously the environment. And if Trump—I mean, look who’s he’s appointed to the head of the EPA, and look who he’s appointed to the head of the Labor Department. I think Americans take seriously income inequality, I think they’re waking up to that…I think the American people are apt to say, “Enough is enough.”
TM: Looking at his other picks, today it was announced that Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn has been tapped to be the National Economic Council Director. He has Wilbur Ross, Steven Mnuchin. I mean this is a kind of bald-faced plutocracy.
LL: Yes, it’s Wall Street’s plutocracy.
TM: Do you think those nominees are they all that different from who Clinton would’ve picked if she won?
LL: No, I don’t think so. Trump’s got the chairman of his economic advisors as Steven Schwartzman, and I think that’s who Hillary had in mind. I don’t know that for a fact...It might not have been Gary Cohn, it might have been Schwartzman, or it might have been Jamie Dimon, or it could have been Alan Patricof. But yeah, the same--Larry Summers, for Christ’s sake...look at who [Bill] Clinton had. He had Goldman Sachs, Paulson was Goldman Sachs...And the same thing with George W. Bush.
TM: Given who Trump is appointing and the things he’s pledged to do, what institutions do you see as most vulnerable? Or is it an all-of-the-above kind of situation?
LL: Well pretty much all. But certainly the EPA, certainly the environment. Because I think that’s the most important one, actually. Well, no, you can’t say that, because, Christ, what do you know about the Department of Defense? I mean, these people could...I don’t see the three guys that he’s got so far wanting to ease up on Iran.
TM: Not Doves.
LL: Not Mr. Flynn.
TM: You hear a lot of people blaming a lot of things—racists, third-party candidates, white working class voters, the electoral college, identity politics. In your mind, who or what is really responsible for Trump?
LL: I think what’s to blame is what Fraser says in The Age of Acquiescence—the failure to keep the argument going. Because democracy is tension, and it’s not supposed to be easy and orderly and safe. It’s supposed to be a really sharp argument between the governed and the government, between mind and matter, between men and women, between competing interests. The ascension of -- this is Fraser’s point -- the age of acquiescence. Starting in the ‘80s, there’s no real objection from the left -- no objection that was anything more than decorative. Media was all down on the side of money and the status quo.
TM: I want to talk a little bit about the process of the normalization of Trump in the media. In the run-up to the election, people didn’t think that he was going to win, and his positions were absurd, and he was pandering to racist elements in the country. And then he becomes president-elect and he’s sort of normalized and—
LL: No, there’s no question about that. Stock market’s gone up 500 points...And even David Brooks is edging over...And Thomas Friedman: I’ll advise Donald about climate change and he’ll listen to me because I’m Thomas Friedman. I mean, where you really saw it was -- where it was beautiful, where it happened in a week, was in 2001. In August, George W. Bush was being portrayed as a complete fool. Stock market was down, he was piss plain dumb, couldn’t talk...And then 9/11, and a week later, The Washington Post is comparing him to Lincoln, and The New York Times is comparing him to Churchill. It was magnificent...And they’ll find reasons to normalize Trump, sure.
TM: How can Americans resist Trump’s agenda, and what role do you see writers playing in that?
LL: Trouble is that writers have been discounted in the American scheme of things over the last 50 years now. I’m old enough to remember -- I’m at Yale in 1952 to 1956, and to be a writer was an important thing. There was the belief that writers could change the world. And the heroes were people like Camus, Yeats, even Auden, and Hemingway, Mailer. The notion that literature was going to come up with important answers. Solzhenitsyn -- the novel as heroic. And again, that’s an idea that comes out of the 19th century. That’s Victor Hugo in exile from the Second Empire in France. That’s what Flaubert was trying to do. Balzac was trying to do the same thing. Dickens. William Dean Howells in this country, Twain -- the writer was a heroic kind of figure, or at least had that possibility. That’s what Mailer was trying to be.
And in the 1960s, they actually had writers on the cover of Time magazine. I can remember that really, before 1962, Time magazine had on the cover Mailer, Roth, Bellow, not Vonnegut yet, and maybe not Heller. And then it was all over -- No, Updike. And then I don’t think they had another writer, then they had Solzhenitsyn on the cover somewhere in the ‘80s. And then for Christ’s sake, they come up with Jonathan Franzen, and compare him to Tolstoy. I mean, that’s farcical.
And part of that I think is the atomic bomb. Once you get the atomic bomb, then man now has it in his power to destroy the Earth. Oppenheimer, quoting Shiva: I am the destroyer of the worlds. That’s what he said looking at the nuclear explosion. And so the heroes of our age are essentially money guys or politicians with their hand on the button or cosmetic surgeons and scientists who are going to discover the way for us to live to 150 years, and the Silicon Valley people, you know, the magicians.
And so the writer seems to have less -- Nader explained this to me once. Nader said that when he, in the ‘60s, published Unsafe at Any Speed, within a year, there were hearings, rules got changed, safety belts got put on cars. And this was genuinely true in the ‘60s. Protest the Vietnam War. The Civil Rights Movement -- civil rights legislation goes in with Johnson. It had an effect. Now, it doesn’t have an effect. We all know that we’re being governed by crooks, but we make a joke out of it. That’s Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.
TM: The Oxford Dictionary chose “post-truth” as the word of the year. And there’s that Corey Lewandowski quote: “This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes -- when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar -- you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.” How do you see covering President Trump, who’s so hostile to the media, as different from covering past presidents, and what increased responsibility does the media have?
LL: I don’t know. I’m really curious to see it, because I think [the media] hurt themselves with crying wolf so much. And now they’ll come across something that’s real. I mean seriously real. And who’s going to believe them. And I don’t know what you do with a president who tweets? What do you with it in the media? Do you tweet back? I mean, shit...it is really scary. It’s to where -- who knows or who cares what the truth is, is the point. And we will maybe not care until we find ourselves impoverished or in jail or conscripted. I mean, I don’t know how many times you got to get poked in the stomach before you get it.
This article is the first in a series of interviews with authors, journalists, artists, and activists about life and resistance during the Trump Administration.